By BECKY KISER
Hays Post
There may be dangerous lead water pipes in the city of Hays. A contractor has been hired to determine how many and where they are.
In late November, the Environmental Protection Agency announced utilities or cities would have to pull and replace lead pipes within 10 years as part of a national initiative spearheaded by the Biden administration.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention maintains there is no safe level of lead exposure for children.
In Kansas, the EPA estimates 54,107 lead pipes remain, while the Natural Resources Defense Council believes there are more than 160,000, the third-highest number per capita among all the states.
Hays is working with Burns & McDonnell Engineers and BlueConduit, which does predictive modeling to identify areas where the city might need to investigate for lead pipe.
BlueConduit is a national company that has been approved by the Kansas Department of Health and Environment to locate pipes in communities across the state.
KDHE is paying for the Hays project.
The deadline to identify the pipes is October, said Jeff Crispin, director of water resources for Hays. The city has more than 8,000 service lines.
"What we're working on now is data," Crispin said, "including partial data in our GIS system of dates when homes were built in which parts of town.
"Then they'll recommend sites where we'll go out and do some inspection."
Crispin expects about 150 sites will be inspected initially.
"We'll soon go out and visually identify meter locations for any lead or copper service lines," he said. "We'll go back and look at previous installations, what year something was installed.
"After 1986, lead was removed basically ... You cannot install anything lead. That's a pretty good indicator anything built after 1986 — a newer part of town — would not have any possibility of lead in the system."
Based on work done in other municipalities, Crispin has been told that about 400-450 sites will need to be examined in Hays.
He said there are not many records of contractors running into lead lines when installing water infrastructure, "so that's good."
In February, Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach led a coalition of state attorneys general in opposition to the EPA's requirement that more than 9 million lead pipes across the country be replaced.
A joint news release contends the rule "is unworkable, underfunded, and unnecessary and should be withdrawn."
In May, the EPA allocated $26.8 million to Kansas to replace lead water pipes through a program funded by the federal infrastructure law.
The funds will be made available to municipalities for line replacements as needed for the next 10 years.
"There's still a lot of uncertainty out there about what may or may not happen," Crispin said.
"Every indication I'm getting is that the due date of October this year is still going to hold true. I understand there's a lot of states out there fighting the EPA on this, but I don't see it going away."